Thursday, December 20, 2012

Sandy Hook Should Teach Us How To Think

Following the horrific mass murder in Sandy Hook,
Connecticut – 27 people slain, 20 of them innocent children – it took but a
moment for some politicians to mount their various hobby horses and, in an
effort not to let this bloody crisis go to waste, call loudly for “immediate action”
on gun control measures. Here is the Hartford Courant lashing the political
draft horses: “Stay angry. Remember how you felt this weekend. Don't let the
faces of those children go until meaningful, actual steps are taken to make
this a safer and less violent country.”

Any call for immediate action while the heart is bludgeoned
by emotion should be politely resisted, because right action – the only kind
that actually solves problems – generally follows in the train of right
thought. Emotional responses, however appropriate given the circumstances, often
lead to ineffective dead end streets and solutions that only solve the problems
of those proposing solutions.

After barrels of ink have been spilled over the mass murder
in Sandy Hook, this is what we know – or think we know – about the slaughter of
the innocents:

The mass murder was committed by Adam Lanza, a young man of
20 years who was living in Sandy Hook with his divorced mother, 52-year-old
Nancy Lanza, his first of 26 victims. Mr. Lanza shot his mother in the face
four times while she was sleeping in the morning, acquired from the house
possibly as many as four weapons owned by his mother, traveled in her car to
Sandy Hook Elementary school, forced his way into a secure building, murdered
the principal of the school, Dawn
Lafferty Hochsprung, who heroically lunged at him in an attempt to
prevent the ensuing mayhem, entered two classrooms and murdered 20 students and
6 faculty members.

Mr. Lanza committed suicide shortly before or after first
responders entered the building. This is an important datum because it
establishes a connection between the time of response and the number of
victims. It is reasonably supposed that Mr. Lanza would have murdered many more
children if the preventative response from police had been longer. Had Mr.
Lanza survived and been arrested, he could not have been executed in
Connecticut, because the state’s General Assembly a year ago abolished capital
punishment, except for those awaiting punishment on death row when the bill had
been passed. The abolition bill followed closely upon the heels of another much publicized mass murder in Cheshire.

Early reports strongly suggested that Mr. Lanza was affected
by the divorce of his parents. Assuming a causal connection between the divorce
and the crime, no one has yet suggested that national legislation abolishing or
severely controlling divorce would in the future prevent such horrendous
crimes. And in any case, such a bill would never be offered. The divorce lobby
in the United States would simply overcome any and all efforts of the president
and Congress, many members of which are divorced, to impose restrictions on an
accepted institution approved by a large part of the population.

Some attempts have been made by commentators and reporters
to shift the primary responsibility of the crime from Mr. Lanza to his mother.
According to this view, Mr. Lanza was a troubled child, suffering from a form
of Asperger’s disorder, a condition
characterized by a lack of social skills. The term itself has been dropped from
a revised diagnostic manual used by the American Psychiatric Association. In
the new manual, “Asperger’s disorder,” characterized by poor socialization, is
subsumed under the category ‘‘autism spectrum disorder.’’ The terminological
changes are important because insurance companies use the manual to decide
which psychological conditions to cover. Mr. Lanza’s psychological disorder --
if any -- has not been determined. According to one report, his mother was on
the point of committing Mr. Lanza to a mental facility when she was murdered.
It has been speculated that Mr. Lanza’s discovery that his mother had intended
to commit him involuntarily was the “tipping point” in his mass murder crime
spree. That report has been denied by a friend of the mother. Others speculate
that Mr. Lanza spent an inordinate amount of time playing violent video games
in his “windowless cellar,” and this may have corrupted his moral sense.All these speculations ought to be taken with
more than a grain of salt. How does one go about proving a necessary connection
between violent video games and, in this particular case, a massive and
murderous assault on young children and their wards? That connection, if any,
remains obscure because the uncommunicative Mr. Lanza took the precaution of
destroying the hard drive of his computer before setting out on his murder
spree.

Within the
political arena, a rush is on to write legislation imposing tighter controls on
guns while the events at Sandy Hook yet boil in the public mind, and some of
the politics surrounding the massacre in Sandy Hook are positively ghoulish.
David Axelrod -- one of the campaign advisors for lame
duck President Barrack Obama whose associate, Rahm Emanuel, is best known for
his sagacious apothegm “never let a crisis go to waste” –
has sent out an e-mail urging supporters of the president to
watch the president’s moving address to the community of mourners in Newtown;
two links in the e-mail open upon a video of the president’s remarks, and two superfluous
donate buttons ask for $15-$1,000 for his campaign. The donate buttons are more
than awkward and gruesomely classless. They are unnecessary: The president is
term-limited, and so are any future campaigns of his. But why let a crisis go
to waste when one might use it to scoop up blood money? Do the mourners in Sandy
Hook know what you’re up to Axelrod? Probably not – because the quisling media
in Connecticut is emotionally and ideologically attached to solutions that
advance the cause of the Chicago political mob and progressive Democratic
politicians in Connecticut.

When is a
solution to a problem not a solution to a problem? Answer: When it is proposed
by former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now, after the retirement of US. Senator
Joe Lieberman, Connecticut’s senior US Senator. Democratic State Senator
Brendan Sharkey, due to take over the Speaker’s position in the State House
when scandal stained state Senator ChrisDonovan leaves the chamber, did not feel he was stretching the truth
when he compared the “madness” of the murderous attack in Sandy Hook to the
"lack of compromise and common sense" that often keeps politicians
from coming to a consensus in the legislature.

The General
Assembly and Governor Dannel Malloy are about to apply their common sense to
the events in Sandy Hook. “One thing you can count on,” wrote askeptical commentator in the New Haven Register, “is that the Connecticut legislature
will react to the Newtown shootings in a way that is stupid, ineffective and
outrageously expensive. As long as the Democrats get a warm, fuzzy feeling that
they've done something, all is well. I'm guessing you'll see a bunch of
unfunded mandates about school security, none of which will do the slightest to
address the real causes of this tragedy.”

Mr. Lanza is dead and cannot be
questioned; his mother is dead and cannot be questioned. Important information
on Mr. Lanza’s computer that might have exposed Mr. Lanza’s motivation has been
destroyed. Newspaper accounts are larded with second hand information, some of
which is not reliable. A formal report on the crime has yet to be released.
Connecticut’s gun regulations are highly restrictive. Safety precautions at
Sandy Hook Elementary school were in force when a determined Mr. Lanza shot his
way in and murdered 26 people. It is highly unlikely that new gun legislation
will prevent similar occurrences – which is NOT to say that reasonable
regulations should be removed from consideration.Norway, the site of the worst mass murder in
modern times – 77 people dead – has the most restrictive gun laws in Europe, as
well as the most liberal policy on capital punishment.

As might be expected, Norway has a
massive population of hunters. Guns in civilian homes in Norway include
semi-automatic and bolt action rifles as well as shotguns. There is a total ban
in Norway on automatic weapons for civilians, and any modification of
semi-automatic guns to fully automatic without police consent is a felony
crime. There are caliber restrictions on handguns; the Smith & Wesson model
500, for instance, is too high powered to be legal; less powerful guns used in
sport shooting are legal.

Norway restricts the purchase of
ammunition, which is only sold to those who have a valid weapon license. In the
absence of a special permit, only 10,000 rounds of ammunition can be stored by a single person,15,000
rounds if 5,000 of them are 22LR or smaller caliber. Two kg of black powder may
be stored in a separate building if the person has a license for a black powder
firearm.

Despite these restrictions, Anders
Behring Breivik, armed with illegal weaponry AND HAND GRENADES, bombed major
buildings in Oslo in July of 2011 and invadeda camp of the Workers' Youth League (AUF) of the
Labour Party on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 people, mostly teenagers.The 33 year-old Mr. Breivik was unanimously convicted of
premeditated murder by a five judge panel and sentenced to imprisonment for 10
to 21 years, the maximum allowed under Norwegian law. Mr. Brevick said his
attacks were intended to inspire a militant uprising throughout Europe that
would restore its nationalist purity and rebuff Islamic migration.

Mr. Brevick’s sentencing judge said
of him: “He has killed 77
people, most of them youth, who were shot without mercy, face to face. The
cruelty is unparalleled in Norwegian history. This means that the defendant
even after serving 21 years in prison would be a very dangerous man."

Indeed, no place
is safe from dangerous men who regard the kinds of bills that will be hammered
out in Washington and, redundantly, in Connecticut in the wake of the Sandy
Hook massacre as momentary impediments to be overcome. The United States is not
Norway. And if it were Norway, heaped round with the same restrictive gun
regulations, it would not be safe from Mr. Brevick. Magic thinking – which
supposes that if there were no guns, there would be no Brevicks or Lanzas –
encourages dangerous illusions of safety that are certain to be pierced by a
deadly reality.

This does not mean that reasonable gun regulations are
pointless.

We know that in Sandy Hook a quick response on the part of
first responders was instrumental in saving lives. The principal of the school and
first grade teacher Victoria Soto, both of whom bravely stepped into a line of
fire to save children, are genuine heroes. If there were in schools throughout
the state alarm systems connected directly to police departments, much as fire
alarms are connected to fire houses, that system very well might prevent a
massive loss of life in similar situations. Locating police substations in some
schools might mitigate such horrific activity; in an age of instant
communication, why must police stations be centralized? The single most
important impediment to a much more massive loss of life in Sandy Hook was the
arrival of the armed resistance. When Mr. Lanza became aware of the arrival of
the cavalry, he stopped shooting. Some sort of an armed resistance in the
schools, whether a police or enhanced security presence, might help.

Everyone in Connecticut whose hearts have been bruised by
the loss of life in Sandy Hook -- that is, everyone in Connecticut – is praying
for solutions that solve the problems of people who have been bludgeoned by
reality. A political milking of the crisis helps only the milkers.